


Shakarian Files

by dbz2010



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe, C-Sec, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-14
Updated: 2019-02-09
Packaged: 2019-09-17 21:27:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,349
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16982100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dbz2010/pseuds/dbz2010
Summary: The adventures of Vakarian and Shepard if the events of the first Mass Effect game hadn't occurred and instead he joined C-Sec.





	1. chapter one

**Author's Note:**

> This is something I started to work on during NaNoWriMo in November. Chapters will be released probably on a bi-monthly basis or when I get one done if I catch up on the chapters that I have finished. This is basically a side-project to my long-fic that I have going.

Shepard looked over at his partner who was leaning back in his chair while drinking dextro coffee as he scanned his report that he had written up late last night. They had busted a drug ring in one of the many bars in the lower wards late last night and Vakarian had told him that he wanted the report bright and early on his desk for their boss in the morning. It had taken three cups of crappy coffee and several colorful words before he had written up a subpar report for the boss. He wasn’t sure if it was up to Vakarian’s standard.

He fretted over the report as he bounced a leg on the ground while trying not to make it too noticeable that he was anxious. He was scanning the database for any reports that they might follow up on-robberies, any other drug rings, or an odd report or two that might have slipped the radar of the higher-ups. He hated being idle and any cased that might come their way might stave off that idleness for a little while longer. Sure, they were detectives but that didn’t mean that he couldn’t go digging through case files and suggest to his partner which ones that they could hint for the Executor could assign them.

Finally, after what seemed like an hour, Shepard heard the clink of the datapad hitting the desk. “Good enough, Shepard,” the Turian said in his dual-toned voice.

Shepard nearly scoffed at Vakarian’s words but held back on it. He didn’t want to offend his partner. Afterall, the Turian had been in C-Sec longer than he had. While Shepard had been in the Military for eight years before he had enough of it and asked to join C-Sec. His claim was that the mental damage done to him on Akuze was too much for him if he stayed in the Military any longer and that he needed a change in lifestyle and pace. Brass agreed and here he was now with a Turian partner drinking day-old coffee and stale donuts that might have come from the lower wards but he wasn’t too sure about it.

“Daydreaming, Shepard?”

Shepard got snapped out of his light daze as he realized that his partner was slightly hovering over him. “No, just…remembering the past.”

“Well, put the past back where it was. Executor Pallin wants to see us. There has been an…incident involving a Council Spectre. And that is all that I know. We need to get more information straight from the…what is the phrase you Humans say, goat’s mouth?” Vakarian stated as he shoved away from his partner’s desk and started to head towards the door.

“Horse’s mouth, Vakarian,” Shepard shouted back at him as he bolted upright from his desk before scurrying after the Turian. If the Executor had wanted to see them both for this type of assignment then something must have gone right after all this time together. Or wrong. Either way this type of assignment just doesn’t fall into a mere detective’s laps like this unless someone requested it. He had a hunch that was the case but until he had solid evidence, he had to go on his gut instinct alone with that feeling.  
***  
Shepard had a bad feeling that things were going to be more than a little troublesome for them when they entered Executor Pallin’s office an hour later. They hadn’t accounted for the bad traffic on the way up to the Citadel Tower and so they had gotten a call midway to their destination from their boss wondering where they were. After a bit of convincing from Vakarian that they were indeed on their way and that they were just in a bit of rush hour traffic, Shepard had thought that their troubles were over with. But when he saw the look on Pallin’s face (if you could call it that) when they entered the older Turian’s office, he knew that the trouble was just beginning.

“So, it seems like you have made quite a name of yourself before you left the Earth’s military, Shepard,” Pallin said as he handed Vakarian a datapad.

“I didn’t really mean to do so, sir,” Shepard said as he stared down at Pallin’s desk. “To be quite blunt, me surviving the thresher maw attack on Akuze was pure dumb luck on my part.”

“Hmm.” The dual-toned note rang out a little dull to Shepard’s ears but he didn’t comment on it. He learned early on to not belittle his superior, or question him either. He had gotten the short end of the stick with assignments (or none at all) and that had gotten him a lower paycheck as a result. Or sometimes none at all if he was suspended for a week (which happened his first year before he got partnered up with Vakarian).

“This needs to be kept hush-hush. The entire Citadel doesn’t need to hear that a Council Spectre was found with a dead body in their room.” Pallin’s face was stern-looking, which made Shepard concerned. Why was the Executor so concerned with keeping things on the down-low with this case?

It seemed that his partner was thinking the same thing since the other Turian spoke up for him. “Sir, I don’t usually talk out of order but…why the whole secrecy? Council Spectres don’t normally do this sort of thing. I highly doubt that this is the case here.”

“I would normally agree with you, Vakarian, but there are witnesses and a dead body. Along with the fact that the room is checked out to a Spectre. Trust me, I don’t want any more trouble than this is worth hence the hush-hush that I want out of this. Get this done quickly and quietly. I don’t want the Council to bring down their hammer on me or you two. Dismissed.”

Vakarian did a slight bow-thing with his upper torso while Shepard just merely nodded his head before the pair of them turned and left the Executor’s office. They both walked to the elevator in silence before Shepard decided to break it right as soon as they were heading down to the ground level.

“What are we doing?”

“What do you mean?”

Shepard paused for a few moments before turning to face his partner. “You know exactly what I am talking about. This whole…political thing that we are doing. This isn’t a crime scene that we are investigating. We are trying to get a Council Spectre out of a murder and we probably know that he or she killed someone in their room and is now trying to get away with it scot-free.”

He could see the wheels turning almost literally in his partner’s head as Vakarian thought about it while the elevator continued its climb down to the ground floor. There was a soft ding and the Turian snapped back to reality. “come on, we have a job to do.”

Shepard groaned as he walked out of the elevator a few paces behind the other male. He wasn’t too happy about this assignment but what could he do? He had a job to do and he wasn’t about to jeopardizes his entire career for a gut feeling that he was having about a Council Spectre that he hadn’t met before.


	2. chapter two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shepard and Vakarian investigate the scene of the crime to find that things aren't what they seem.

The scene of the crime looked clean-almost too clean to Shepard. They had arrived at a top-tier hotel that was way above his paygrade. If he had to calculate how much he had to spend to get a room here he would have to give up his apartment and everything in it just to spend an hour in the room, much less get room service (if that).

Vakarian was talking to one of the CSIs that had already taken photographs of the crime scene before making his way back to his partner. “So, the Spectre has been taken downtown for questioning already. We should investigate this crime scene before heading down there ourselves.”

“I don’t see the point. We should just get the report from the CSIs and go there now,” Shepard retorted before seeing a look in his partner’s face.

“There might have been something tat they might have missed. You know how they work. They only look for the obvious clues and nothing else. We are more thorough than that. you have found more clues in the past investigations that we have done than those stupid CSIs that C-Sec employs.”

Shepard tutted at his partner’s words before turning his omnitool on searching mode as he headed deeper into the hotel room. It was spacious for a simple room and from the looks of it there was a walk-in closet along with a very spacious bathroom for them to search. “So, where should we search first?”

“I am going to the bathroom. You should check the closet.”

Sheard chuckled under his breath. “Right, is that a subtle hint for me to come out of said closet?”

“What? And blow your cover as a closet gay? Never,” came a sarcastic response from the Turian.

“Sure, Vakarian. Whatever you say.” He walked towards the closet and opened the doors. Inside were fancy looking suit and tie jackets and pants that obviously looked like they belonged to a Human. He thumbed them to the side to access the back part of the closet and stepped inside of it. There were rows of real leather shoes on the lower levels of the racks on either side of the walk-in closet along with fancy day-clothes just above them. scattered among the leather shoes were a few running shoes that looked like they were in the couple hundred credit range. Shepard whistled low under his breath as he scanned the closet with his omnitool to look for any clues.

After a few minutes of searching, he came up with nothing in the closet. Sighing, he briefly suspended the searching program before leaving the closet to see Vakarian standing just outside of it.

“See-you just came out of the closet. How does it feel?”

“I feel like a million bucks,” Shepard said sarcastically.

There was a dual-toned chuckle that escaped from the Turian’s maw before Vakarian cleared his throat and got back to the task at hand. “So, what did you find in there?”

“A whole lot of nothing. All I know is that thus guy has expensive taste…and is Human.” Shepard looked around the main room briefly before turning his gaze back on his partner. “Just what is the Executor not wanting us to find out?”

“That the first Human Spectre might have fucked up really badly and killed a hooker in his hotel room? I mean, why kill her here? Why not in his expensive apartment in the upper Wards?”

“Yea….what, what do you mean expensive apartment?” Shepard gave his partner a glare as he stepped the few feet that separated them. “And how do you know about this Human Spectre?”

“It was all over the Galactic News a few months ago, Shepard. Where have you been-under a rock?”

“You know me-I don’t like to get into politics. I never did when I was in the Alliance military and I still don’t keep up with it now that I am with C-Sec.”

He heard his partner sigh as he turned away from him. “Shepard, this isn’t simple. This is the first Human Spectre. We need to toe the line here and do things by the book. I don’t want you to get suspended or worse…fired. Just…just follow protocol and my lead, okay?”

Shepard walked away a few steps and rubbed his forehead with one hand. This was turning into a shit show and he wasn’t sure if he wanted to be involved in it. It was a few minutes before he turned back around towards his partner with a frown before he started to talk.

“So, what do we need to do?”


	3. chapter three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shepard and Vakarian finally make their way downtown to interrogate Alenko but ends up being interrogated himself by the Human Spectre.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you guys like this chapter. Please leave any comments if you find any errors in this chapter or any of the previous chapters. Thanks!

Four hours later and a severe comb-over the hotel room later, Vakarian and Shepard finally made their way to the downtown C-Sec headquarters. Were they a little late in getting to interrogating their suspect? Maybe but Shepard didn’t really care about that minor detail. All that he cared about was getting the facts straight about this crime that the Human Spectre had supposedly had done in his hotel room that he didn’t need to get int eh first place.

As they approached the interrogation room, Vakarian stayed back a little bit. Shepard noticed it and he turned to face his partner.

“I’m fine, Shepard,” the Turian said with a wave of his talons. “I figured I would let you interrogate the Spectre since he is one of your kind after all.”

“Right, sure, like that’s exactly what I wanted to do,” Shepard said sarcastically with a sigh. He turned towards the two-way mirror and looked out at the suspect. He recognized the man as being a Biotic but he wasn’t too familiar with him. He knew him as being the XO of the Normandy. He was also a Major, which was also confusing as fuck but he didn’t question it at all.

He must have hesitated for a moment too long because an Asari in a newbie C-Sec uniform came up to him and gently poked him in the shoulder. “Um…sir?” She hesitated briefly as she looked back at Vakarian and then back at him. “Are…are you ready to interrogate the prisoner?”

Prisoner-that word chilled Shepard to the bone. So, they had processed the Major and put him in a cell while they had dawdled in the hotel room searching for clues. They should have come down here right away as soon as they had gotten the report from the CSIs but instead Vakarian insisted that they combed over the hotel room further thus taking up valuable time.

“Yeah, I am ready to interrogate the…prisoner,” he said. He hesitated before the word ‘prisoner’. It just felt a little odd to say that word. He didn’t want to admit that their suspect was one but here he was. But he wasn’t in the orange jumpsuit. More than likely his ties to the Council was keeping him out of it…at least for now.

He waited until the Asari opened the interrogation room door before he swept into the room. Someone, the Asari he figured, shoved a datapad in his hand right before the door closed. The Major lifted his head up as the door clicked closed behind Shepard.

“Huh, so they sent another Human in to question me,” the Major said, his voice gravely.

“Yeah. To be honest I don’t know why they sent me in here. Maybe it is because I am a Human. Or maybe it is because I am ex-military. Either way, let’s make this as painless as possible,” Shepard said as he turned the empty chair around the wrong way before sitting down in it.

“Ex-military? That means you must be Commander John Shepard-the only survivor of the Akuze incident.” The Major chuckled as he spotted the raised eyebrow that Shepard gave him. “Everyone in the Alliance knows about that incident. Your entire unit got slaughter by thresher maws…well, everyone except for you. Tell me, how did you manage to survive it while your military buddies didn’t?”

“I thought I was asking the questions around here.” There was a brief pause before Shepard continued on with his statement. “But to answer your question I guess I could call it pure dumb luck.”

“Luck doesn’t keep you alive, Shepard,” the Major said bluntly.

“It does when you have a goddamn good weapon in your hands.” He sighed as he glanced down at the datapad still in his hands. “This is getting us nowhere. Look, I left the military on my own accord for various reasons. Akuze was just the starting point to those reasons. Let’s not dwell on that. Let’s focus on the task at hand. The Council seems to think that you are innocent of killing this Asari that was found in your hotel room.”

He pointed at the datapad before tossing it onto the table that separated the two men. “Let’s start from the beginning Major…”

“Alenko. Major Alenko,” the other man said with a sigh. “Look, I told the other C-Sec officers this and I am going to tell you this, too. I did not kill that Asari. I don’t even know how she got in that hotel room to begin with or how it was checked out under my name. I have an apartment here on the Citadel. I was staying there while the Normandy was on shore leave here. Why would I get a hotel room when I could have gone to my apartments?”

“Why indeed?” Shepard said as he leaned back away from the chair a few inches. “I was just telling my partner that same exact thing. The hotel room was filled with expensive things, too-suits, shoes, food. Something only a Council Spectre could afford.”

“I know this is being a bit paranoid but maybe someone is setting me up. I don’t do this sort of stuff. I don’t go looking around for hookers to bring up to unknown hotel rooms for a night or two. And I most definitely didn’t check out a hotel room in my name. I went straight to my apartment as soon as the Normandy docked here at the Citadel. The Council didn’t need to see me until the tomorrow, well today now, so I figured I would catch up on some overdue sleep.” Alenko sighed as he leaned back in the cold iron chairs that had been provided for the interrogation room. “I know that the hotel must have surveillance footage of the night of the murder. Why not take a look at it and see for yourself if I am on that footage? If I am then put me through a…polygraph to see if I am still lying to you.”

Shepard stared ahead at Alenko wondering if the other man was bluffing. He hadn’t really gone through all of the evidence so far that the CSI team had gathered from the crime scene because he had thought that maybe Alenko might confess to the crime so easily. But it wasn’t turning out that way. He was going to have to comb over the evidence with his partner after all, including taking a look at the surveillance footage of the night of the murder.

“Fine I guess we can do it the hard way, then. But you are going to have to go to a cell while we go over every piece of evidence our people took from that room,” he said as he got up with the datapad. He walked over to the door, banged on it a few times, and left the room as soon as the Asari from earlier opened it for him.

As soon as the door to the interrogation room closed shut behind him, his partner was right at his side. “So, do you really believe everything that he said?”

Shepard shrugged his shoulders as he handed off the datapad to a random C-Sec officer. “To be blunt, I don’t know anymore. He says that he went straight to his apartment but why was the hotel checked out under his name. If he didn’t check it out under his name, then who? And why? There are just too many questions to this case that I really don’t want to know the answer to. Mainly because this whole thing with the Council trying to keep this investigation hush-hush.”

“I am sure that news of a Council Spectre getting arrested has reached the public by now. If it hasn’t then the Council is taking extreme measures to keep it that way,” Vakarian said as he rubbed his chin lightly with two talons.

“I still don’t like this,” Shepard muttered to the Turian. “It just feels wrong.”

“I know but there is nothing we can do,” Vakarian said before he patted his partner’s shoulder lightly with his talon. “Come on. We have some evidence to comb over.”

“Great,” muttered Shepard. “Another all-nighter in the office.”


	4. chapter four

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After hours of combing through the evidence, Shepard finds the true killer but was it worth the all-nigher that he had to pull?

After several hours of going over the reports and physical evidence that the CSI team had collected from the hotel room, both Shepard and Vakarian were running out of clues as to who really committed the crime. They had figured out early on that Alenko hadn’t been in the room. The Major’s DNA was nowhere to be found int eh room, at least according to the reports and the CSIs reports were almost never wrong.

The only evidence that they hadn’t been through yet was the vid footage from the hotel. Shepard resigned himself to being the sole person to going through the countless hours of watching the many vids of footage that was recorded of the night of the murder. He wasn’t sure what angle to view the footage at so he opted to view all of them, including the hallway just outside of the hotel room.

Finally, after what seemed like forever but when it was only three hours of boring surveillance vid watching, he got what footage he needed to prove that maybe, just maybe Alenko was telling the truth. All he had to do was wait for Vakarian to get back to C-Sec. He had sent his partner home after the Turian started to fall asleep on him. Shepard needed a nap himself but he chose to go after some stale donuts and three cups of the bitter brew that C-Sec called coffee.

As soon as oh-eight-thirty hit, Shepard was already on his fifth cup of the horrid brew. He didn’t look up when the Turian sauntered up to his desk and leaned against it. “So, did you find the evidence that the Council is breathing so hard down our necks for?”

“Yeah, I found it alright but I don’t think the Council is going to like it anymore than you will, Vakarian,” he said as he put down his empty mug with a dull thud.

“Why do you say that?”

Instead of verbally answering, Shepard motioned for Vakarian to follow him to the evidence room where he had hidden the surveillance vids from earlier that morning. The Turian complied with his partner’s wishes and followed him where he saw said vid still paused at a time set in the early morning the night of the murder.

“Umm…Shepard, aren’t we supposed to see the murderer’s face in this vid? Why do I see an empty hallway?”

“Just wait. Trust me on this. You aren’t going to like this one bit,” Shepard said as he motioned for his partner to sit down in the chair in front of the vid screen. Vakarian begrudgingly complied and stared at the vid. Shepard hit the pause button to resume the vid and took a few steps away from it and turned his back on his partner so that he wasn’t watching both the vid and his partner’s reaction to it.  
***  
Five minutes later, Shepard heard a muttering of something behind him. He took it as a curse word in Vakarian’s native language since it didn’t sound at all Human to his ears. “Don’t like what you saw?” he asked from behind his back.

“No, I damned well don’t like what I just saw, Shepard. That…man in the vid. He is supposed to be dead.” Vakarian sighed as he rubbed his forehead with both talons. “Saren Arterius died four years ago in a private execution. He got labeled as a traitor to the Council after he got caught doing something he wasn’t supposed to. The Council said that they would ‘take care of him’ and six months later declared him deceased.”

“It seems like the Council slacked in that department. I wonder why he has targeted Alenko, though.” Shepard turned around to see his partner’s reaction. Vakarian shrugged slightly at Shepard’s words.

“To be bluntly honest with you, I have no idea what to do. I think we should report this to Executor Pallin immediately. He might have a better insight in what we should do.”

Shepard tutted under his breath at that idea. “I know full well what his idea is going to be, Vakarian, and he is going to say that we should wrap this investigation up ASAP, declare Alenko free of all crimes and let the matter be. It is bad enough that a Council Spectre is behind this but one that had been stripped of his rank and should be dead? There is no way Pallin is going to let us continue on with this case even if we beg him, which I don’t recommend.”

“You know we need to do things by the book, Shepard. And if that is the way it should be then maybe that is what it should be,” Vakarian said in a suggestive tone of voice.

“I don’t like it. Dead ex-Spectres aren’t supposed to be walking around alive much less committed acts of murder and more treason,” Shepard said with a sigh. “Let’s just ask Alenko about this first and see what he has to say about it. I would feel a lot better if I found out why Saren was targeting the Major.”

“Fine, I guess it wouldn’t hurt to do that,” Vakarian said as he got up from the chair. “I am sure that C-Sec must have let him go by now. We didn’t really have any solid evidence that he had done any wrong-doings to begin with and now that we really don’t have any evidence that he was there to begin with he is very much an innocent man that got taken in and booked for a crime he didn’t commit.”

“Yeah, we can go an apologize to him like the kind C-Sec officers that we should strive to be.” Together they strolled out of the evidence room and headed towards the cell block to see if Alenko was still there.


End file.
